Category Archives: Art

War Between Worlds

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Last night we left my daughter at Girl Scout camp, then stopped off at a thrift store and picked up a few UFO conspiracy books that we will give to a friend of mine, then we went to the cinema to view the destruction of the East Coast by tripods from space.

It was a renewing experience.

First, I’ll say that War of the Worlds was one of the most riveting, compelling movies I’ve seen in a while, and certainly the best of its (questionable) genre. For comparison purposes, I found Independence Day to be a steaming load of crap, ditto Deep Impact and all the rest of the “End of the World” epics that have been produced of late.

In fact, I find the genre somewhat ridiculously gratuitous, in that it feeds an unhealthy fascination with our own mutual assured destruction–whatever the metaphor being employed.

I believe War of the Worlds fundamentally different and groundbreaking in its treatment of the idea of worldwide terror. Here’s why.

1. Immediacy and the individual as witness to events: Rather than be dismayed, as some have been,  at the linearity of the storyline, I felt the choice to tell the complete tale from the point of view of the Everyman was a brilliant one for the subject matter. The as-yet unattainable goal of these movies has been to make us feel “we are there,” to identify with the characters that are going through this nearly unimaginable horror. Yet past directors gave us, to a man, the incredibly tired pastiche of “stock” characters, each “dealing” with the situation in their own way. (The young woman with a child, the brave soldier, the down-and-out guy with a heart of gold, the scientist who “knows,” etc.) But in the space of two hours, with the destruction of the earth to also address, it’s difficult–impossible, actually–to fully develop 12 characters anyone can believe in or, more importantly, care about. It’s hard enough to do in a regular movie, which can devote most of its time to this task.

What Spielberg did was focus the timeline and the action like a laser on Cruise’s character. He is in virtually every scene, and every event is seen from his point of view. This immediacy creates as much “reality” as can be had in a completely implausible situation. True, Cruise’s “nature” or personality is not deeply explored–but that too has its purpose, in helping allow us to imbue him with whatever qualities we require of our own personal “everyman.” His is in part the blank slate on which we write our emotions. He is compelling in how he reacts, how he survives, how he evolves into a survivor and a preserver, not in “who he is”, which the director wisely leaves aside in favor of telling the story. This is a morality play, not a character study.

2. Plausibility: Let’s keep in mind the whole thing is a fantasy. None of it would happen. We found ourselves discussing a lot of this–why the aliens would go to all the trouble of planting the tripods a million years ago rather than taking over Earth right away; how they would know where future major population areas would be; why, if they are so advanced, they did not do an environmental study on possible contagions before “dropping in” with their full invasion force, etc. But this movie is by no means about plausibility–who thought it “likely” that terrorists would fly jet liners into the World Trade Center before it happened? Not me. So we are offered events that “come out of nowhere,” just as the real attacks have come, and events whose purpose we cannot immediately discern, just as we did not immediately comprehend why anyone would want to destroy the WTC and Washington. And here–here–is where the director triumphs. Note the first scenes of this film. Rather than the hour or so of terminally boring exposition that these films tend toward (to “build suspense” which never gets built), Spielberg instead presents a quick introduction to the main characters (for basic dramatis personnae purposes), then immediately throws the situation into chaos. If we think of the terror allegory, this is exactly how it happens. We did not have a “buildup” to 9-11, or Bali, or Madrid, or the Chechen massacres–or London. They happened out of the blue, caught us off guard, with our pants down. As Cruise stands there gaping, impotent, in the face of the world literally cracking up under his feet, I stood there with him, in my memories, agape at the cracking up of my own world.

And though some might deem it hammy, I thought the emergence of the tripods from “below,” rather than raining fire from above as usual, was a nice touch. Enhancing the metaphor on terror, society was literally being attacked by the “seeds” of terror come to fruit, seeds that had been planted long before.

3. On terror. Spielberg hammers the idea of terror, of the shock and unreality of it, right home, quite amazingly I thought. When Cruise finally shakes off his initial shock and realizes he must leave–leave now–he goes to his friend’s car repair shop and proceeds to take possession of the only working vehicle in the city. As his friend stammers about how he’s got a business to run, it’s not my car, the guy’s gonna come back, etc., Cruise repeatedly screams at him to “Get in, get in, get in the car!” His friend is fixed in the static world of normalcy, of past-present-future, of dependency. Only Cruise has realized that that world is instantly gone, that only the immediate peril matters. The parallels to reactions to terrorism are quite nicely evoked–I saw so many who simply shrugged on 9-11–on that very day–and said, “Oh well, I don’t live in New York.” I heard  people laughing about it. They did not see that the world as they knew it had just ended, that their world would now be shadowed by the pall of terror–forever.

People too young to remember, or too cocky to admit the truth to themselves, may claim that terror cannot change their world, a la John Lennon. They are wrong, wrong, wrong. It has changed their world whether they recognize it or not. This is not to say, “Everybody panic.” Far from it. It just states the fact of it, that local insulation will not change global reality.

This brings up the other major theme of this movie, one I think others of its type have squeamishly avoided or sidestepped. The car becomes the metaphor for escape, and of course it becomes an object of envy. With respect to the way humans conduct themselves during “real” world-shattering events, the way the car is handled in the movie speaks to the darker side of our natures. Rather than everyone “pitching in” to fight the bad guys, when people finally realize that there is a good chance they will be exterminated, their community spirit goes right out the window. It becomes, literally, every man for himself. It should not have seemed over the top when Cruise pulls a gun on the crowd, gets a gun to his head, he and his son get beaten to a pulp by the panicked crowd, over possession of the vehicle. And when the gun-wielding carjacker is himself blown away by another, in cold blood, this should not be a surprise. As Art Spiegelman’s father says in his Holocaust allegory Maus–“Friends–huh, put you all in a room with no food for a couple of weeks, and you’ll see how many friends you have.” In these scenes, Spielberg evokes the real horror of such terror that strips people of their humanity and turns them against one another–against their own better natures–in a desperate bid for survival. In this way Spielberg invokes visions of another movie he made about world-shattering wars of aggression and terror.

Yet–the notion of kill or be killed to survive one more day is also undercut by the action. Spielberg cannot resist his trademark bid for humanity for humanity’s sake. As noted, the man who takes the car at gunpoint is himself gunned down–he sacrificed his humanity in vain. And note that Cruise finally kills Tim Robbins’ character in his own bid for survival–but is immediately afterwards found by the tripods and captured anyway. It was a waste. To kill another who threatens you is one thing, but to kill only because you fear that person’s existence might threaten your safety–that is one step too far, and not coincidentally is the step that the U.S. (and Britain) have wrongly taken in their paranoid reaction to terror.

About the end – this was indeed a bit hard to swallow. But I took it, like most of this film, metaphorically. I was mostly surprised at the survival of the son, who if I recall was last seen walking into a wall of flames. But note that there is no dialogue–it is a surreal scene. No one speaks, no one interacts, except for Rachel to yell, “Mommy!” They are all “there” as human beings, but–grant me this–not necessarily alive. The “family” has been preserved–the family of man–though some have died. To me, this is the message of this scene. Sacrifice, in the name of preserving who we are–we are families, by the way, not nations or races or religions–does preserve us, even if we die. It preserves our essence, our souls, if not our flesh.

4. Film-making. In the end, what most impressed me about this film was the flawlessness of the cinematography, effects, sets, pacing, editing and all-around film-making. This is one beautiful apocalypse. The tripods are gracefully, terrifyingly menacing, like omnipotent archangels of death from on high. Their prowess in killing, their pitiless wielding of that prowess, quite evocative of the bafflingly inhuman, murderous efficiency of terror cults–or imperialist armies, if you like. Their foghorn of death is rattlingly disturbing each time it sounds, a sickly send-up of Gabriel’s horn. The foggy, ashen landscapes cut by the searching lights of the tripods are beautiful, awe-inspiring in their grandeur. The destruction is so real, it was not hard to imagine I was watching a documentary. Understand, I like to work at suspending disbelief – if the director is trying, I’ll help out all I can with my imagination. But I felt I had no work to do at all. I felt as if I were watching real events unfold, in real time. No ”movie” cuts to this little house or that Oval Office scene, no attempt to provide a “world afire” vision encompassing the globe and every possible reaction–just the immediate surroundings of one man, whose immediate surroundings keep getting more and more surreal, more dreamlike, more hopeless with every scene, and his reactions. But because I follow him into this world, progress with him into horror, I find it believable no matter how bizarre it gets.

The film is not perfect, not a film for the ages, perhaps not even great. But it’s good. It’s a film for now, for us, to help us examine how we perceive our world now, in its new wrapper. As someone on the radio said the other day, “We all live in Jerusalem now.” We all will live with exploding buses, exploding people, every day now. Safety, always an illusion, will become even harder to conjure up. We will have a permanent spot, in the back of our minds, reserved for the horror when it comes again.

And it will come again.

Spring and Hope, Together Again

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The sap rises in my newly shorn trees. Buds poke out of the stems I have been warily watching, dreading  they may have died over the winter. But they didn’t. Nor did I. Another spring, another promise.

My daughter has progressed with her bicycle riding.  We will buy her a bigger one this summer, so her knees don’t hit the handlebars. We’ll finish reading her Lemony Snickets book to her, then we’ll start another. Fairly soon the three of us will head off to Niobrara for a therapeutic weekend away from the city, a needed diversion from all of these same days of work, school, and the rest.

I’m trying to punch up my own activity level. Last weekend I took a huge pile of branches from an overgrown shrubbery to task, bending and twisting and finally splitting the green wood, which needed tearing away from its supple bark to make the complete break. It was a Herculean task, one that didn’t really need doing, but I did it anyway. Then I broke them further and spent the afternoon burning the twigs and branches in my outdoor fireplace while drinking a beer.

Very satisfying, but my winter-soft muscles were sore for days afterward. Next week I will plant grass.

I need to get my own bike down off its inverted perch in the garage and put it to use again. I need to get on the trail, feel my legs again. Lately, all I feel of them is the pain from sitting too long, working too long, twisting my impatient legs in knots under my desk. I told my daughter we’d ride the trail together now that she’s a good rider, which scared her a little. But she’ll be fine.

She says she wants to cut her hair short for the summer. That’s a good idea.

We’ll take her to Colorado in June, to the Rocky Mountains. She can climb, breathe the thin air with us, pan for gold in the little stream beside the cabin. We’ll build fires at night, watch the stars from the deck. We’ll eat well.

My house is in order. My trees are trimmed. My clothes fit. It’s a good spring so far, and my home is happy. We are of this Earth, and we belong here. I was made to enjoy these things, and not to wonder at joy’s quotient.

Wordsworth lamented, “The world is too much with us.” And it is. The idiocy of the world won’t stop just because I’m in a good mood. But he also knew that being at one with the real world–nature–was something to aspire to, even as the world of men continues to vie for our attention and tries its best to demonstrate to us our soul’s corruptibility, our body’s corporeality, and our great grand experiment’s utter futility.

Frost knew:

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

Here’s to the futility of grand things.  I too am a happy swinger of birches these days.

Transit of Venus

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On June 8 Venus, as she does twice every 113 years or so, insinuated herself between Earth and Sun. Gliding across the disc of the sun like a ship on a sea of fire, she once again faithfully described her transit to earthly observers.

“The first Transit of Venus observed by humans occurred  in 1639, witnessed by one Jeremiah Horrocks in Lancashire. The suggestion that a Transit of Venus, observed from different parts of the world, could be used to measure the actual distance of the Earth from the Sun, was first made by James Gregory and Edmund Halley, (Astronomer Royal 1720-1742).

The realization that the transits of Venus could solve, what many saw to be `the last great problem in astronomy’ provoked enormous interest in the 18th century, and even countries that technically were at war (Great Britain and France) collaborated in this great international scientific experiment. Expeditions were dispatched to distant lands to observe the transits over as large a geographical area as possible. Captain Cook was sent on his first voyage to the Pacific by the Royal Society to observe the Transit from the island of Tahiti. Other astronomers traveled to Africa and throughout Europe to time the exact instant of transit. King George III built himself an observatory at Kew specifically for the purpose and Charles Mason traveled to Ireland to view the transit from Donegal.”

—from Armagh Observatory’s “Story of the Transit of Venus”

I missed the transit of June 8, which is not as sad as it may seem since this part of the world only had a piece of it, and the skies of the Plains were up to their usual cloudy tricks.

This was, however, one of those odd convergences I enjoy so much. I was paying close attention to the transit, because just a couple of weeks earlier I had begun reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon, a sprawling historical fiction concerning the exploits of Mason and Dixon before, during and after the surveying of their famous line.

The early parts of the novel (I’m still reading the bastard) are given over to a fictional account of Mason and Dixon heading down to the Cape of Good Hope to observe the 1761 transit for the Royal Society. Actually, Captain Cook was dispatched by the Royal Society to the South Pacific, where he observed and made detailed notes on the transit. But Mason himself did indeed, as the above excerpt notes, carve out another place in history for himself with his view from Donegal.

For Pynchon, the excitement generated in the 17th century over the Transit of Venus was emblematic of the age, when the mysticism and folklore of the past collided with a new spirit of scientific inquiry governed by reason and–observation.

They found their parallax view that year, and charted the distance to the sun, confirming the astronomical unit forever. It must have been exhilarating, to finally know for sure. It was an age of such times, of learning the orbits of the planets, the working of the human circulatory system, the structure and forms of matter.

Yet it was also a time of loss, when the Earth lost its place as the center of the cosmos and was unceremoniously relegated to a standard orbit around an average star in an outer arm of a run-of-the-mill galaxy. Witches lost their powers, and the elves and fairies faded into lore.

And now, as science itself has become the repository of received wisdom–and belief–the transit generates only mild interest in a fragmented society busy with its 24-hour news cycle, its frenetic work week, its American Idols. Science has done with Venus, for now, for she has told us all she can about our world.

And just last week my friends held their annual Summer Solstice party, an evening of music and beverages, with the band under the stars on a garden stage. I missed most of that, too, as I rushed from a restaurant. But I showed up, wearing a special t-shirt I had made to commemorate the occasion. It depicted the sun, with the words Solstice 2004 above and “Transit of Venus” below. I put a tiny dot on the edge of the sun to represent Venus at the end of its crossing. To me, it also represented the end of such events as occasions of national interest. I think we are done with “national interest,” at least of the non-catastrophic kind.

So Venus makes her silent transit, just as she always has, just as she always will.  And some of us marked the occasion, and some didn’t. In 2012 it will happen again, and then she will be off to her outside orbit until the next transit in 2117, when none of us will care. The serious, deliberate consistency of the cosmos goes on. The distracted attention of humanity fixes on what it will, when it will, perhaps understanding and perhaps dismissing this cosmic convergence or that. And therein, I suppose, lies the difference between the eternity of planetary motion and the immediacy of planetary living.

The Nose of the Boar

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My wife and I just returned from a week in Italy, Florence to be exact.

This whole thing started by planning a run-of-the-mill trip to San Francisco. It was last September. I was on the Web, checking out fares and accommodations, getting a line on some pretty good deals. Then I started thinking about it. What, exactly, were we going to do in San Francisco? We could visit some friends and relatives, maybe see an art opening, but in fact we had already seen all of the “sights” on our last trip there. And in truth I had no great desire to go back.

Then I started thinking, “Well, then, where do you really want to go?” And I knew right away it must be Florence.

I had visited Florence once before, when I was a lad of twelve. My family was living in Naples at the time (a great place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there). We drove up to Florence for a two or three day visit.

When we got there I was immediately blown away. The city itself is a work of art. The narrow cobbled streets, the ancient buildings, the winding Arno and its beautiful bridges, all surrounded by the rolling Tuscan hills. This is the city of the great Medici, the city of the Renaissance. Here is Brunelleschi’s famous dome for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (AKA the Duomo). Here is the Uffizi, the greatest museum of the world (with the added feature that it is not in France). Here are dozens of important basilica, cloisters and cappella. Here is the home of Dante, of Galileo, of Michelangelo. Here is the birthplace of modern art and science.

Of course, I didn’t quite see it that way at age twelve. But I knew I was in a magic place, a place that exists outside the mundane world of office towers, malls and suburbs. I knew the streets were for walking, and that the cafes were for idling, and that the people were alive to it all. I saw Botticeli’s Birth of Venus and knew I was in the presence of a masterpiece. I drank wine in a family-owned Trattoria and strolled to the Mercato Nuovo, an open-air market famous for leather and stationery, where I rubbed the nose of the boar.

And in truth, that was it. I had forgotten, until some days after I had convinced my wife that Florence was our destiny, after I had booked the flight and the townhouse, after I had checked out my Italian language CD from the library–I’d forgotten that on that chilly night in 1974 I had in fact rubbed the nose of the boar at the Mercato Nuovo. The boar in question is a large bronze statue of same, one of the several symbols of Florence. Its nose is kept perpetually shiny by the hands of a thousand tourists a day, all of whom know that a visitor who touches the nose of the boar is guaranteed to return to Florence one day.

As I did. And I am forever thankful to that boar.

Novel Binges

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I appear to have slowed down on these entries. I’ll take a moment here for meta-logging (a log entry about my log) to note that the reason I’m writing less is that I’m reading more.

For the last several years I’ve been going on reading binges, reading a bunch of a particular writer’s novels in a row. At present, I seem to be bingeing on George Eliot. In fact it is the English writers, and particularly the English writers of the 19th and early 20th, that most often get me this way.

It started a few years ago. When I was in school, of course I had to read what they told me, and that was almost always an academic variety of works. But in graduate school there were seminars, of course, offering complete immersion into an author’s canon. I remember reading everything Jane Austen ever wrote inside of three months. I guess that approach stuck with me.

Let’s see – it began a few years ago with Nabokov. I finally read Lolita and decided it was the greatest novel I’d ever read (a frequent occurrence). Then I picked up Glory, then Ada (an amazing novel, really unlike any other), and then King, Queen, Knave. After all that, it was natural to move on to Speak, Memory, his great autobiography. Then when I finally got hold of it (a nicely bound copy, a present from my wife) I read Pale Fire, which is truly astounding literature.

Vladimir Nabokov is a literary genius. That’s all there is to it. Those Russians are incredible thinkers.

Next, I think, was Graham Greene. I had read Brighton Rock in college and loved it. So in quick succession I read The Quiet American, The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, and recently The 10th Man. Six books about jealousy and infidelity. Are they all about that? Doesn’t matter.

Thomas Hardy, anyone? I had loved Tess of the D’urbevilles, so followed with Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. All fine novels, but too much Hardy is dangerous, so I stopped there for now. (If you’ve read much of him, I’ll trust you to know what I mean.)

Last summer I read The Hobbit followed by the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy without stopping. That was great fun. I felt like a fugitive from Middle Earth by the time I was done.

Then came my Canadian period. I loved Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries, so followed it with Larry’s Party. Then Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin – a real melancholy treat – followed immediately by her take on The Robber Bride (good but not great). It was a rare excursion into modernity.

And lately it’s been George Eliot. I’ve grown pretty much obsessed with her. I re-read Middlemarch first, really savoring it after rushing through it in college. Then Silas Marner, and now I’m heavily into The Mill on the Floss.

I’ve read other stuff in between these binges, but the binges have kind of characterized the reading pattern. I sometimes wonder if I’m being methodical or just lazy. But I don’t wonder too much. It’s all great, and I need to read as much of it as I can. It is an addiction I recommend.